Status-Q

South-facing trees on a north-facing slope.

Have just discovered that British Pathé have a splendid archive of "90,000 Historic Clips".

Here's a pleasing little example. (I remember meeting George Cansdale a couple of times in my childhood - he was a minor hero of mine.)

If you like these, you can also find a good selection of historic videos on the Internet Archive.

This publicity stunt for the movie Chronicle is nicely done, I think.

More info here .

We all know the courtroom drama, where the suspense is tangible as we wait for the jury's verdict. But should such things actually happen, asks Richard Dawkins in a New Statesman article?

Extract:

You cannot have it both ways. Either the verdict is beyond reasonable doubt, in which case there should be no suspense while the jury is out. Or there is real, nail-biting suspense, in which case you cannot claim that the case has been proved ""beyond reasonable doubt"".

Click here to watch the webcast.

45 mins of talk, 45 mins of questions. Well worth the time.

If you're an elderly Computer Scientist (i.e. older than about 35), you'll enjoy James Iry's post, A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. Extract:

1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie. 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension".

OK, I’ll stop posting skiing pictures now. Probably.

A shot from my impromptu skiing trip last week.

Lots more photos here.

Geoff took some nice photos of me on the slopes today.  I've edited out the ones that made me look less cool.

If you read my earlier post, you may be amused to notice that the poles are not the same colour in all of these pictures!